There is an incredible diversity of positions and arguments. But underneath this variety are comparatively few causes, many of which rest on disagreement over fundamental concepts like good, right, and happy. Contemporary arguments are overwhelmingly instantiations of ancient disagreements in the sense that both would cease if such concepts were genuinely agreed upon.

Although all necessary disagreements terminate in conflicting axioms, passionate disagreements endure when several sets of such axioms are valuable despite being incompatible. The worth of essential systems, validated by empirical effectiveness and grounded in coherent positions that reduce to these axiom sets, impassion argument. Justifications grow in sophistication, but remain in tension because they point to irreconcilable truths.

Over the last eight posts I attempted to illuminate the most fundamental of such tensions; a tension I find latent in most arguments that, as long as it remains latent, reduces them to minor acts of refinement rather than advancement – in those rare cases when they rise above propaganda or derp. This is the tension about the inevitability of tension itself.

My argument consists of two substantially independent tracts which represent two sides of this tension: one that argues for the value of absolutes and another that argues for the limits to agreement on them. I have come to view both of these positions as axiomatic to the point that I am willing to call them laws:

Law of Absolute Belief: “Purpose and effectiveness rest on absolute belief.”

And:

Law of Plurality: “Universal agreement on absolutes is impossible.”

These seemingly paradoxical laws have disturbing implications and I did not come easily to their acceptance. But now that I have accepted them, I am not easily compelled to engage propositions that question them. Yet such propositions are ubiquitous. A major motivation for this series was to justify my reluctance to argue past a violation of these laws. Continue reading Laws of Absolute Belief and Plurality →

We’ve looked at the banality of problems that plague execution, the limitations of the perfect worlds of strategy, and the deep, often conflicting, hierarchies that underlie action. We’ve seen how difficult it is to create, communicate, and scale coherent action hierarchies. But these might still seem like practical challenges that can be overcome if we could just make our models accurate enough, our meta-capabilities developed enough, our goals clear enough, our language explicit enough, and our incentives powerful enough. Maybe not today, but in the future. Maybe if we could gather sufficient empirical evidence, develop direct brain-to-brain communication, build an optimal planning computer, or otherwise improve our capabilities, we could converge to solutions that are fair, stable, effective, and objectively correct.

It is common to blame lack of progress towards convergence on bad faith or incompetence. It is obvious how power, money, fame, or nepotism incentivize defense of the status quo. It is easy to find examples of hypocrisy, immorality, laziness, or unfairness. It is tempting to reach a comforting, but wrong, conclusion that perverse incentives, bad people, and flawed systems are the reason we don’t move towards obvious solutions.

There are, of course, massive practical imperfections that can be improved. But underneath all the misunderstandings, inefficiencies, bad faith, and practical challenges there are legitimate disagreements that have been engaged in good faith by smart, conscientious, and resourceful people for millennia; disagreements that have proven impossible to conclusively resolve even with the purest of intentions and even in the most idealized of thought experiments. Underneath the status quo are concessions – not just to the practical difficulty, but – to the theoretical impossibility of complete agreement.

The search for universal agreement is much like the search for perpetual motion machines. Continue reading Magical Foundations of Agreement →

Accurate and coherent action hierarchies seem obviously necessary for productive action. How can haphazard everyday decisions lead to desirable long term consequences? How can incoherent models lead to effective strategies? How can uncoordinated action avoid mistakes? How can resistance to feedback lead to strong models and capabilities? If we don’t know where we are going, how can we expect to get there?

It is therefore immensely frustrating to see incoherent action all around us. From the smallest individual projects to the largest organizations and global concerns most action seems shortsighted and detrimental to its own goals. Furthermore, opportunities for disproportionate increases in effectiveness seem simple and obvious.

The cornucopia of potential improvements is at first baffling and then empowering. Who would have thought that basic insight could be so rare and valuable, that inexperience could be a source of vision? Unencumbered by limitations of obsolete technology, social norms, and past obligations visionaries can better see the flaws of existing structures and are well positioned to direct their improvement.

But even the simplest, most beneficial, and least contentious changes are resisted with greater fervor than visionaries thought possible. Some blame this unexpected resistance on lack of logic, but individual actions do tend to follow from their goals, models, and skills. Others blame individual action hierarchies: if they can generate such irrational behavior, then they ought to be replaced. But this obvious solution faces the same fate as the one that led to it: people vigorously resist overt attempts to influence their action hierarchies.

It is to the questions of why people do this and how it affects action and progress that we turn to next. Continue reading Magic and the Challenge of Action →

The correct thing to do seems so obvious, its implementation so simple and clear in our heads. Why then is turning it into reality so difficult and error prone? Why is doing it ourselves so much easier than explaining it to others? Is the answer really obvious or does it merely appear to be? What is behind the feeling of clarity? What is behind effortless action? Why are they so elusive and difficult to convert into results?

Before we can tackle questions like these, we need a model of action. Such models tend to hide underneath arguments, disguised as something obvious, and are important to make explicit. I’ll develop my model in this post and apply it to the challenge of action in the next one. I suspect that while many will indeed find my model obvious, and perhaps overwrought, many others will find it incomplete, incomprehensible, irrelevant, or wrong.

At its broadest, an action can be separated into three parts: goal, strategy, and execution. Goals define the purpose of action and are the ultimate measure of progress. Strategies are plans to move from current reality to the state defined by the goal. Execution is the interaction with reality in service of the goal.

While roughly correct, this view ignores or abstracts too much to be very useful. A major issue is that strategy generates a hierarchical set of sub-goals for execution to implement, but this implementation requires strategy at each step. It is difficult to draw a non-arbitrary line between strategy and execution because they are themselves a hierarchy of actions, each with its own goal, strategy, and execution.

It is similarly unclear how independent child actions are. We can treat them as inseparable parts of a larger whole because their goals are substantially defined by the parent’s strategy; or we can treat them as largely independent because they determine how, or if, to achieve these goals.

We can thus defensibly approach action with a focus on strategy, execution, or interaction between substantially independent actions. The first two views correctly recognize the value of unified action towards a coherent purpose and of skill and autonomy on the ground, respectively, but tend to underestimate their own limitations and lead to disappointment and ineffectiveness. The latter view more accurately captures the challenge of action. Continue reading Anatomy of Action and Understanding →

Once upon a time I liked to derive lessons from stories; sometimes I still do. A recurring lesson is the impact of minor mistakes and random circumstances on the character’s fate. If only they stayed quiet, or paid more attention, or used a newer car, or avoided traffic, or were less trusting… Mistakes that were easy to avoid with just a little more knowledge or composure or preparation.

Of course, the writer needs to end the story and villain’s mistakes allow difficult odds to be overcome in an exciting way. But there are deeper reasons for errors: individual pride, complacency of experience, overconfidence of inexperience, effects of stress on decision-making, trade-offs inherent to skill-sets.

We focus on mistakes as failures to prepare at the expense of a broader lesson: “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Leaders respond with deeper plans, contingency plans, redundancy, more data, explicit procedures, education… They develop meta-plans to make plans responsive to the dynamics of execution, they build ever-more complete ways to evaluate results and feed them back to decision makers at ever-faster rates.

But more complex plans have more ways to fail, redundancy breeds complacency, contingency plans are under-tested, procedures reduce individual motivation and attention to detail, credentials give a false sense of confidence… And problems again arise for reasons so banal they would be funny if they weren’t so painful. Continue reading Banality of Problems and the Limits of Scalability →

Perfect worlds occupy a sizable chunk of intellectual thought. They can be points of departure as with the Garden of Eden or Rousseau’s natural man. Or goals of progress as with Marx’s final stage of history, Plato’s Republic, or Buddhist nirvana. Or simplified models of reality as with much of economics. Or mindsets open to objective truth as with Rawls’ veil of ignorance.

The appeal of perfection is easy to understand. We want truth. We want to act ethically and effectively. We want to make correct plans to achieve worthy goals. Such efforts lead us to ever-higher levels of abstraction which culminate in perfect worlds.

Perfect worlds rest on correct principles. Principles that are true and mutually consistent. Principles that can be understood, communicated, and adopted by everyone. Principles we can link back to to resolve disagreements, motivate performance, and justify demands. Such actionable agreement makes the world efficient, fair, and stable, makes individual lives meaningful, ethical, and comprehensible.

Perfect worlds offer powerful answers that conform to our highest ideals, that inspire us with the possibilities of unity and clarity. So we search for truth to define and justify principles with which to build coherent goals, models, and systems. We communicate them to others and rally against those that are based on wrong principles, are poorly implemented, or are hypocritical.

When you find correct principles it can feel like you’ve unlocked the entire puzzle. Continue reading Perfect Worlds and Their Limits →

A common source of impassioned disagreements, bitter disappointments, and judgmental moralizing is over-extension of good principles. Such principles are not only deeply believed, but have proven themselves to the believers. They really do embody important truths and they really do work.

At the core of disagreement isn’t truth or efficacy, it is exclusivity and universality. There can be, and often are, multiple functional approaches. Even if one approach is best, it relies on assumptions – such as values and capabilities – that might not be universally available.

People try to prove that their approach is best and that, therefore, we should promote the required values and capabilities. The task is intertwined with their morality, sense of purpose and justice, the vision that guides their lives. It is difficult to acknowledge alternatives without putting your own morality and worldview on trial, without undermining the passion that drives you.

I propose a mindset, let’s call it Plurality of Absolutes, as a solution. The essence of this mindset is that (1) different mechanisms drive the social world at different scales and that (2) most beliefs can be justifiably held as long as one restricts scope. Continue reading Plurality of Absolutes →